By MIREYA NAVARRO
SAN SALVADOR,
El Salvador -- El Salvador's newly elected president is both the
philosophical
follower of an Indian guru who teaches nonviolence and the political heir
of a
far-right leader
linked to death squads during the civil war.
Francisco Flores
a former president of El Salvador's unicameral National Assembly, ran as
the new
face of a renovated
Nationalist Republican Alliance, or Arena, the conservative governing party
that
has captured
the presidency in the last three elections.
But as he celebrated
with supporters late Sunday night as the polls closed, he paid homage to
Arena's main
founder, the late Roberto d'Aubuisson, a former national guard officer
and ally of
wealthy landowners
who was a suspect behind many right-wing killings during this country's
civil
war, including
the 1980 slaying of Archbishop Oscar Arnulfo Romero.
"Let's remember
the values of our founder," Flores told to a cheering crowd. "Let's remember
Roberto d'Aubuisson."
The solemn, bespectacled
Flores, 39, who holds a bachelor's degree in political science from
Amherst College
and attended study programs at both Harvard and Oxford's Trinity College,
runs
little risk
of being associated with Arena's murky past. But many Salvadorans still
regard him with
apprehension,
wondering whether he represents meaningful change or just a fresh image
for business
interests adverse
to political reform in this poor country of 5.8 million people.
Final election
results were not expected until Wednesday, but electoral officials said
on Monday that
Flores' lead
was expected to hold.
"Is this a transformation
or is he a professional at the service of millionaires?" asked the Rev.
Jose
Maria Tojeira,
the Roman Catholic rector of the Central American University here. "Arena
is more
moderate than
in d'Aubuisson's days but it's in the hands of rich people who don't favor
social
change."
Flores, who won
a five-year term starting on June 1, said in a recent interview that his
candidacy
was a response
to Salvadoran citizens' demands for more participatory politics. The day
of
reckoning came,
he said, after legislative and municipal elections in 1997 where Arena
suffered
heavy losses
to the Farabundo Marti National Liberation Front, the party of former guerrillas
whose
presidential
candidate came in second on Sunday with 29 percent of the vote.
"If, in the political
spectrum, you had the FMLN, and, on the other side, Arena, there was a
need to
make a move
to the center by both parties," he said.
The FMLN, Flores
said and many others agree, tried to broaden its appeal for the 1999 elections
but failed to
come up with a candidate "without the smell of gunpowder," as a political
analyst with
the newspaper
"El Diario de Hoy" put it in a column on Monday. Internal power struggles
led them
to settle on
a former guerrilla commander, Facundo Guardado, a moderate who could not
overcome
many voters'
aversion to a left they still remember as violent and destructive.
Arena, on the
other hand, came up with Flores, who has no direct ties to the war and
was known as
a consensus
builder in the legislature.
"I feel that the party realizes that its survival as a political institution lies on a real opening," he said.
Known by the
nickname "Paco," Flores said he spent the war years between 1983 and 1990
teaching philosophy
and managing an irrigation project for a community of 300 families next
door to
the cattle ranch
and stud farm he had inherited from his grandfather. He said he paid for
the project
himself while
his wife, a school teacher, ran an elementary school for the families.
He said he had
been gone from El Salvador between 1977 and 1983, when he went to college
in the
United States
and ended up moving to India to study oriental philosophy after being "fascinated"
by a
professor's
lecture at Harvard. In 1981, he went to the World University of America
in Ojai, Calif.,
a small unaccredited
school molded after the teachings of an Indian guru, Sri Sathya Sai Baba,
with
followers in
more than 130 countries.
Back in El Salvador,
Flores said he did not think of entering politics until leftist guerrillas
killed his
father-in-law,
the chief-of-staff to then-President Alfredo Cristiani, in 1989.
"When they killed
my father-in-law the options were few," he said. "I didn't want to be part
of the
conflict. I
wanted to be part of the solution and I didn't want to remain in the sidelines."
Flores served
in the administrations of both Cristiani and current President Armando
Calderon Sol in
various ministerial
and advisory positions before he ran for the National Assembly. He now
inherits
from Calderon
Sol a country reeling from one of the highest murder rates in Latin America,
high
unemployment,
and other problems partly attributed to vestiges of a 12-year civil war
that killed
70,000 and ended
only in 1992.
During his campaign,
Flores promised to fight crime by upgrading the skills of the civilian
police force
created after
the war and to generate jobs with new investment in agriculture, manufacturing
and
small businesses
and by attracting foreign investment.
But it remains
to be seen whether he can restore confidence after an election where turnout
did not
even reach 40
percent, largely because voters held no hope that a new government could
solve the
country's problems,
polls showed.
"The war left
a psychological effect of a hate of war," Tojeira said. "That gives us
a margin of 20
years. But if
the economic and social problems continue, these factors could be dangerous
in the
long term."
Copyright 1999 The New York Times Company